This chapter discusses Ralph Vaughan Williams's address to the Fifth Conference of the International Folk Music Council. The English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) exists for the purpose of ...
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This chapter discusses Ralph Vaughan Williams's address to the Fifth Conference of the International Folk Music Council. The English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) exists for the purpose of preserving and disseminating the folk songs and dances of England in their traditional forms. However, the disseminators and the preservers do not always see eye to eye. The disseminators are so anxious that the whole country should take a practical part in the discoveries that they are sorely tempted to put quantity in the place of quality. The preservers, on the other hand, are too apt to allow folk song and dance to become a dead art, an affair of libraries and dry discussion. Williams has no quarrel with popular music, but he does feel that the International Council should confine itself to what is truly traditional.Less

Address to the Fifth Conference of the International Folk Music Council

David Manning

Published in print: 2007-11-22

This chapter discusses Ralph Vaughan Williams's address to the Fifth Conference of the International Folk Music Council. The English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) exists for the purpose of preserving and disseminating the folk songs and dances of England in their traditional forms. However, the disseminators and the preservers do not always see eye to eye. The disseminators are so anxious that the whole country should take a practical part in the discoveries that they are sorely tempted to put quantity in the place of quality. The preservers, on the other hand, are too apt to allow folk song and dance to become a dead art, an affair of libraries and dry discussion. Williams has no quarrel with popular music, but he does feel that the International Council should confine itself to what is truly traditional.

Country music, a largely white tradition that had been fundamental to early rock ’n’ roll, became important again in late sixties country rock. For most of the decade, films about it were country ...
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Country music, a largely white tradition that had been fundamental to early rock ’n’ roll, became important again in late sixties country rock. For most of the decade, films about it were country versions of jukebox musicals, cheaply produced by small companies in the South for local, mainly drive-in distribution that never attained mass recognition or distribution, though they provided superb documentation of many classic performers. Parallel to these, a sequence of major studio productions drew on a Hollywood tradition of anti-Southern bigotry, subordinating the spectacle of musical performance to cynical narratives indicting country’s putative commercialism and the amorality of its musicians. These included A Face in the Crowd (1957), Payday (1973), and Nashville (1975), the last of which was the most egregious attack on popular working-class music since the Elvis movies.Less

. . . And White : Country Music

David E. James

Published in print: 2016-02-01

Country music, a largely white tradition that had been fundamental to early rock ’n’ roll, became important again in late sixties country rock. For most of the decade, films about it were country versions of jukebox musicals, cheaply produced by small companies in the South for local, mainly drive-in distribution that never attained mass recognition or distribution, though they provided superb documentation of many classic performers. Parallel to these, a sequence of major studio productions drew on a Hollywood tradition of anti-Southern bigotry, subordinating the spectacle of musical performance to cynical narratives indicting country’s putative commercialism and the amorality of its musicians. These included A Face in the Crowd (1957), Payday (1973), and Nashville (1975), the last of which was the most egregious attack on popular working-class music since the Elvis movies.

As a re-evaluation of Bob Dylan's folk rock performance at Newport highlights, one central controversy of fusion music has been centered on the relationship between traditional and popular music. ...
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As a re-evaluation of Bob Dylan's folk rock performance at Newport highlights, one central controversy of fusion music has been centered on the relationship between traditional and popular music. This discourse becomes especially apparent in the broader historical background of the partly strongly interrelated folk music revivals. The subsequent historical overview thus sketches the different Folk Revivals in America (1930s-1965) and American Folk Rock (1965-1970) and the Second British Folk Revival (1950s/60s), including the Skiffle Craze and the development of the folk club scene, which has strongly shaped the discourses regarding electric folk. As the focus of this study is set on electric folk from its emergence in the mid-1960s until its disappearance in the late 1970s, later developments after the re-emergence in the 1980s are only briefly sketched.Less

Approaching Electric Folka : A History of Music Revivals, Fusions, and Ideologies

Britta Sweers

Published in print: 2005-01-20

As a re-evaluation of Bob Dylan's folk rock performance at Newport highlights, one central controversy of fusion music has been centered on the relationship between traditional and popular music. This discourse becomes especially apparent in the broader historical background of the partly strongly interrelated folk music revivals. The subsequent historical overview thus sketches the different Folk Revivals in America (1930s-1965) and American Folk Rock (1965-1970) and the Second British Folk Revival (1950s/60s), including the Skiffle Craze and the development of the folk club scene, which has strongly shaped the discourses regarding electric folk. As the focus of this study is set on electric folk from its emergence in the mid-1960s until its disappearance in the late 1970s, later developments after the re-emergence in the 1980s are only briefly sketched.

The story of Yole!Africa began in 1995 against a backdrop of dictatorship, instability, and war. Congo was reeling from the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide and artists were suffering under the ...
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The story of Yole!Africa began in 1995 against a backdrop of dictatorship, instability, and war. Congo was reeling from the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide and artists were suffering under the restrictive cultural policies of Mobutu. At the same time, youth in the eastern provinces were discovering hip hop culture and exploring its potential as a vehicle of resistance. This chapter chronicles the period 1995–2010, during which the current culture of artistic radicalism took root in North Kivu. Politically this period was shaped by the overthrow of Mobutu’s thirty-two-year dictatorship, two significant wars, theassassination of the nation’s revolutionary-turned-president, Laurent Kabila, and ongoing power struggles between armed rebel groups and a fragmenting state. This political turbulence sparked a cultural response among young people in Goma, whose early effort to express dissent through music and film eventually galvanized into a movement of cultural activism.Less

Art on the Frontline

Chérie Rivers Ndaliko

Published in print: 2016-11-24

The story of Yole!Africa began in 1995 against a backdrop of dictatorship, instability, and war. Congo was reeling from the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide and artists were suffering under the restrictive cultural policies of Mobutu. At the same time, youth in the eastern provinces were discovering hip hop culture and exploring its potential as a vehicle of resistance. This chapter chronicles the period 1995–2010, during which the current culture of artistic radicalism took root in North Kivu. Politically this period was shaped by the overthrow of Mobutu’s thirty-two-year dictatorship, two significant wars, theassassination of the nation’s revolutionary-turned-president, Laurent Kabila, and ongoing power struggles between armed rebel groups and a fragmenting state. This political turbulence sparked a cultural response among young people in Goma, whose early effort to express dissent through music and film eventually galvanized into a movement of cultural activism.

American culture, from movies and fast food to popular music and blue A jeans, is being assimilated around the world. They are the dominant creators and distributors of a mass culture that is a ...
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American culture, from movies and fast food to popular music and blue A jeans, is being assimilated around the world. They are the dominant creators and distributors of a mass culture that is a global phenomenon. For most Americans, however, the economic enormity of the country's cultural exports is invisible and easily ignored. The arts industry in the United States is enormous and lucrative, creating thousands of jobs and contributing to economic prosperity in significant, if almost unrivaled ways. The American artistic workforce is formidable and pervasive. However, many parents persist in discouraging their children from taking up an artistic profession because they believe that the arts provide little monetary reward and lack stability and prestige. Unfortunately, the arts are not appreciated for their economic strength. In the public mind, they pale in comparison to the importance accorded to the sciences.Less

The Arts and Economics: Opportunities Missed, Misunderstood, and Minimalized

Charles Fowler

Published in print: 2001-12-20

American culture, from movies and fast food to popular music and blue A jeans, is being assimilated around the world. They are the dominant creators and distributors of a mass culture that is a global phenomenon. For most Americans, however, the economic enormity of the country's cultural exports is invisible and easily ignored. The arts industry in the United States is enormous and lucrative, creating thousands of jobs and contributing to economic prosperity in significant, if almost unrivaled ways. The American artistic workforce is formidable and pervasive. However, many parents persist in discouraging their children from taking up an artistic profession because they believe that the arts provide little monetary reward and lack stability and prestige. Unfortunately, the arts are not appreciated for their economic strength. In the public mind, they pale in comparison to the importance accorded to the sciences.

Audible States examines how elites have governed politically and aesthetically meaningful spaces of silence and sound in Albania since 1945. Interweaving archival research with ethnographic ...
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Audible States examines how elites have governed politically and aesthetically meaningful spaces of silence and sound in Albania since 1945. Interweaving archival research with ethnographic interviews, author Nicholas Tochka argues that modern political orders do not simply render social life visible, but also audible. And in rendering social life audible, states make reality governable in significant, albeit unpredictable, ways. The book’s chronological narrative presents an aural history of government through the close examination of a state-subsidized popular genre, light music, as broadcast at an annual song competition, Radio-Television Albania’s Festival of Song. Drawing on a wide range of archival resources and over forty interviews with composers, lyricists, singers, and bureaucrats, it describes how popular music became integral to governmental projects to improve society—and a major concern for both state-socialist and postsocialist regimes. Incorporating insights from governmentality studies, Audible States presents a new perspective on music and government that reveals the fluid, pervasive but ultimately limited nature of state power in the modern world. In doing this, it addresses ongoing conversations in ethnomusicology, area studies, and cultural studies of the Cold War.Less

Audible States : Socialist Politics and Popular Music in Albania

Nicholas Tochka

Published in print: 2017-01-05

Audible States examines how elites have governed politically and aesthetically meaningful spaces of silence and sound in Albania since 1945. Interweaving archival research with ethnographic interviews, author Nicholas Tochka argues that modern political orders do not simply render social life visible, but also audible. And in rendering social life audible, states make reality governable in significant, albeit unpredictable, ways. The book’s chronological narrative presents an aural history of government through the close examination of a state-subsidized popular genre, light music, as broadcast at an annual song competition, Radio-Television Albania’s Festival of Song. Drawing on a wide range of archival resources and over forty interviews with composers, lyricists, singers, and bureaucrats, it describes how popular music became integral to governmental projects to improve society—and a major concern for both state-socialist and postsocialist regimes. Incorporating insights from governmentality studies, Audible States presents a new perspective on music and government that reveals the fluid, pervasive but ultimately limited nature of state power in the modern world. In doing this, it addresses ongoing conversations in ethnomusicology, area studies, and cultural studies of the Cold War.

This chapter provides methods and models for thinking about avant-garde and experimental films and videos that incorporate popular music. It sketches the history of intersections between ...
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This chapter provides methods and models for thinking about avant-garde and experimental films and videos that incorporate popular music. It sketches the history of intersections between avant-gardists and popular music. It also provides close readings of works by Kenneth Anger, Bruce Connor, Joseph Cornell, Derek Jarman, Tony Oursler, Pipilotti Rist, Andy Warhol and others. It claims that institutional, formal and cultural constraints not only limit the frequency with which avant-gardists participate with pop musicians and pop music, they also colour the audiovisual relations within the works themselves. Avant-garde films and videos with pop soundtracks emphasise particular kinds of audiovisual relation—relations that differ from sound-image connections in narrative films, YouTube clips, commercials and music videos. It is demonstrated that this experimental subgenre embodies a unique sort of sound-image relation and suggests, finally, that these videos can expand our knowledge of audiovisual relations more broadly.Less

Avant-Gardists and the Lure of Pop Music

Carol Vernallis

Published in print: 2017-09-28

This chapter provides methods and models for thinking about avant-garde and experimental films and videos that incorporate popular music. It sketches the history of intersections between avant-gardists and popular music. It also provides close readings of works by Kenneth Anger, Bruce Connor, Joseph Cornell, Derek Jarman, Tony Oursler, Pipilotti Rist, Andy Warhol and others. It claims that institutional, formal and cultural constraints not only limit the frequency with which avant-gardists participate with pop musicians and pop music, they also colour the audiovisual relations within the works themselves. Avant-garde films and videos with pop soundtracks emphasise particular kinds of audiovisual relation—relations that differ from sound-image connections in narrative films, YouTube clips, commercials and music videos. It is demonstrated that this experimental subgenre embodies a unique sort of sound-image relation and suggests, finally, that these videos can expand our knowledge of audiovisual relations more broadly.

Due to certain changes which the social order underwent after World War II ended, the Dar ul-Islam (DAR), the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood (MIB), and the Islamic Party of North America (IPNA) ...
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Due to certain changes which the social order underwent after World War II ended, the Dar ul-Islam (DAR), the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood (MIB), and the Islamic Party of North America (IPNA) adapted certain principles for Islamic revivalism that concerned political and religious thought. Although two of these new orthodox sects attempted to institute an Islamic din through the endeavors of the Uniting Islamic Society, they also headed its disbanding of such a movement due to issues of identity and autonomy. One of their shared interests that evoked their perception of modern conversion was popular music. Be-bop, which is rooted in the development of modern jazz, demonstrated how this genre was derived from music idioms of Africa and the Caribbean islands. This chapter illustrates how be-bop served as an aesthetic breakthrough that brought about unity among Africans and those who practiced the Muslim faith.Less

Be-bop to Brotherhood and Beyond

Robert Dannin

Published in print: 2005-09-15

Due to certain changes which the social order underwent after World War II ended, the Dar ul-Islam (DAR), the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood (MIB), and the Islamic Party of North America (IPNA) adapted certain principles for Islamic revivalism that concerned political and religious thought. Although two of these new orthodox sects attempted to institute an Islamic din through the endeavors of the Uniting Islamic Society, they also headed its disbanding of such a movement due to issues of identity and autonomy. One of their shared interests that evoked their perception of modern conversion was popular music. Be-bop, which is rooted in the development of modern jazz, demonstrated how this genre was derived from music idioms of Africa and the Caribbean islands. This chapter illustrates how be-bop served as an aesthetic breakthrough that brought about unity among Africans and those who practiced the Muslim faith.

Beginning in the 1930s, men, and a handful of women, came from India's many communities — Marathi, Parsi, Goan, North Indian, and many others — to Mumbai to work in an industry that constituted in ...
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Beginning in the 1930s, men, and a handful of women, came from India's many communities — Marathi, Parsi, Goan, North Indian, and many others — to Mumbai to work in an industry that constituted in the words of some, “the original fusion music”. They worked as composers, arrangers, assistants, and studio performers in one of the most distinctive popular music and popular film cultures on the planet. Today, the songs played by Mumbai's studio musicians are known throughout India and the Indian diaspora under the popular name “Bollywood,” but the musicians themselves remain, in their own words, “behind the curtain” — the anonymous and unseen performers of one of the world's most celebrated popular music genres. This book offers an account of the Bollywood film-music industry from the perspective of the musicians who both experienced and shaped its history. In an insider's look at the process of musical production from the late 1940s to the mid 1990s, before the advent of digital recording technologies, the author explains who these unknown musicians were and how they came to join the film-music industry. On the basis of a set of first-hand accounts from the musicians themselves, he reveals how the day-to-day circumstances of technology and finance shaped both the songs and the careers of their creators and performers. The author also unfolds the technological, cultural, and industrial developments that led to the enormous studio orchestras of the 1960s–90s, as well as the factors which ultimately led to their demise in contemporary India.Less

Behind the Curtain : Making Music in Mumbai's Film Studios

Gregory D. Booth

Published in print: 2008-10-13

Beginning in the 1930s, men, and a handful of women, came from India's many communities — Marathi, Parsi, Goan, North Indian, and many others — to Mumbai to work in an industry that constituted in the words of some, “the original fusion music”. They worked as composers, arrangers, assistants, and studio performers in one of the most distinctive popular music and popular film cultures on the planet. Today, the songs played by Mumbai's studio musicians are known throughout India and the Indian diaspora under the popular name “Bollywood,” but the musicians themselves remain, in their own words, “behind the curtain” — the anonymous and unseen performers of one of the world's most celebrated popular music genres. This book offers an account of the Bollywood film-music industry from the perspective of the musicians who both experienced and shaped its history. In an insider's look at the process of musical production from the late 1940s to the mid 1990s, before the advent of digital recording technologies, the author explains who these unknown musicians were and how they came to join the film-music industry. On the basis of a set of first-hand accounts from the musicians themselves, he reveals how the day-to-day circumstances of technology and finance shaped both the songs and the careers of their creators and performers. The author also unfolds the technological, cultural, and industrial developments that led to the enormous studio orchestras of the 1960s–90s, as well as the factors which ultimately led to their demise in contemporary India.

This book surveys the music of seventy years of Hindi films and provides a long-term investigation of film songs and their musical and cinematic conventions. Focusing on the music of Hindi language ...
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This book surveys the music of seventy years of Hindi films and provides a long-term investigation of film songs and their musical and cinematic conventions. Focusing on the music of Hindi language films (i.e. Bollywood) in their historical, social, and commercial contexts, the author pays special attention to the meanings that songs generate inside and outside film narratives and within Indian society at large. Songs are a vital component of film promotion on broadcast media, are distributed via soundtracks by music companies, and have long been the hegemonic popular music genre in India (even for people who rarely watch the films for which the songs were written). The book illustrates how film songs are produced through the collaboration of film directors, music directors (composers), lyricists, musicians, and singers in order to enhance the film narrative, but also to have commercial success outside of the film. Through close musical and multimedia analysis of more than twenty landmark songs, along with biographical and musical descriptions of the people who have crafted and performed these songs, this book illustrates how the creators of Hindi film songs have always mediated a variety of musical styles, instruments, and performance practices from Indian and international sources in order to produce a distinctive Indian music genre. This genre has always had cosmopolitan orientations, yet has consistently retained discrete sound and production practices over its long history.Less

Bollywood Sounds : The Cosmopolitan Mediations of Hindi Film Song

Jayson Beaster-Jones

Published in print: 2014-11-07

This book surveys the music of seventy years of Hindi films and provides a long-term investigation of film songs and their musical and cinematic conventions. Focusing on the music of Hindi language films (i.e. Bollywood) in their historical, social, and commercial contexts, the author pays special attention to the meanings that songs generate inside and outside film narratives and within Indian society at large. Songs are a vital component of film promotion on broadcast media, are distributed via soundtracks by music companies, and have long been the hegemonic popular music genre in India (even for people who rarely watch the films for which the songs were written). The book illustrates how film songs are produced through the collaboration of film directors, music directors (composers), lyricists, musicians, and singers in order to enhance the film narrative, but also to have commercial success outside of the film. Through close musical and multimedia analysis of more than twenty landmark songs, along with biographical and musical descriptions of the people who have crafted and performed these songs, this book illustrates how the creators of Hindi film songs have always mediated a variety of musical styles, instruments, and performance practices from Indian and international sources in order to produce a distinctive Indian music genre. This genre has always had cosmopolitan orientations, yet has consistently retained discrete sound and production practices over its long history.